Ok alittle bit of rubies history first.
I started with rubies as a beta tester on 2/12/02 and followed in to retail. I would say by day 2 of the beta i had already decided that i was done with betas as well i would have no more time to dedicate to a beta test as id be playing rubies when it went live. Thats exactly what I did to. Rubies marked my last beta (well almost more on the almost in a moment). As is the normal for me i learned every thing about the game play tweaks for performance etc. With in a week i was not the one asking for help in a quite complex game but was the one offering his help to new beta ttesters. During this time as beta tester I learned of rubies history from people such as huan , (im gona butcher this name sorry (q but thats your fault for useing such a impossible name hehe) qrisnolf, syber, jy-luna fyead and half a dozen other gms? Well found out nope not gms. Huan is one of many names that the owner of the game used/uses.
So what i learned from these guys was that rubies was far older than i ever thought. It was infact the oldest mmorpg out there older than eq even. My jaw dropped. Turns out rubies had 3 stages to its life. Stage one was cancun from from early to mid 90s was a MUD multi user dungeon. From mid 90s to late 90 was the cancun engine including a comercial release in this stage. From late 90s till now is lith tech jupiter. Lots of holes in there im goign to fill in now.
During my time in rubies from 2/12/02 heres what happened.
On 06/01/2003 rubies went comercial with the lithtech engine but by 02/19/2004 its comercial life ended. Normal thing for games this happens to is thats it over done never seen again. But oh no not rubies na never rubies heheh because on 05/21/2004 it reopened as the first donation based mmorpg free to play as long as you want no restrictions. About a month later we had a small p[atch relased that mostly repointed the game client to the correct server for login. By december of the same year a new account type is added that allows server cap bypass the cap was needed to help with lag on our server (im sure youve noticed ive been useing our game alot when talking about rubies im just a gm so why is that?). Dates are a bit sketchy here but also during this time of donations we gained a new server thanks to donations aimed at adding a server then another and finally the pvp server. Little later on one of our servers suffered a major melr down and well never came back up that was one called Pegasus refered to as peggy by most. But the chars were not lost with some serious work by our admins many many hours of data base work they got those chars merged in to the phoenix data base.
More recent history for rubies. We recently thanks to bargle and others got a nice new shinny client .96 wich allows for windowed mode and alt tabbing (abit of a first for a lithtech based game) many bug fixxes in this beta release as well as performance inprovements and the client shrank in dl size from 360ish megs t 280ish megs.
Some of my own history now.
As i said i started the game as a beta tester in 2/12/02 and followed to live as a founder. About 3 months or so preclose I became a gm. Then rubies closed and the days of my beta testing that i thought had went by by for ever returned i got a invite for another beta. Where with in a few short weeks i ended up as a csr just below the level of gm. I stuck with this beta to full retail as well right up to the time when rubies returned as a donation based mmorpg and left the other game soon ater (mostly do to broken prmises i was suppose to be promoted to gm wich for their game was a paid job but it never happened i waited months over a year infact). Apon returnign to rubies do to rule changes i was no longer a gm but hey i did not care rubies was my home and i only need reapply as a sage. I was a sage for about 2 weeks and then back as a gm. tThat brings my history up to date.
Now early i mentioned the fact i was useign the term our game when refering to rubies well thats what rubies really is. It is the players game in many ways. It does get refered to as that by many a player gm and developer alike.
Rubies of eventide is small in size big in heart. Ou community is the best i have ever seen in a game. Sure we get our share of trolls in game but hey that happens every where given enough time. Even this very forum will or may have already had a few. It is the nature of the beast we call the internet. But fact is they do not last long when the community is small and gms or mods etc are around all the time.
I generally do not post little adverts for rubies like this on forums as a personal invite to those on the boards. Infact i think ive done it a whopping 2 times counting this post heh. Ive submited a few buttons to other sites and put the url in forum signitures or as a homepage in my profile. But never a big old invite post. So here it is.
I invite any and all of you who want to check out a little mmorpg to come check out rubies. Some who try will stay some who try won't rubies is not a game for every one its really that simple.
With all that said heres a couple links
main site
www.eventide.netforums
http://www.eventide.net/forums/ubbthreads.phplive chat linked to irc.ausirc.net
http://www.eventide.net/chat.htmlIn chat i am always there as one of these 3 names mostly as nova
nova novaflare or gm-wesan_na_mora .
Feel free to read the forums hang out in chat for a while etc.
We have some realy simple rules. IRC rules are the same as phoenix rules g rated chat for most part. When in doubt dont say it basically. We tend to not allow chat about other games in irc or in gam leads to general all around nastiness flames etc. We get a fair share of game shills (paid spammers basically ither paid by real money or ingame favors). They will come in askign lots of questions about rubies. Popin and out a bunch of times then drop the url for their favorite game sayign you all should check out this game its even better than rubies. This is generally soon followed by me typing /ban nickname after i copy paste their host mask to do a ast ban edit after.
In game help channel on phoenix /h is used only for game mechanics how do i mine craft etc type questions and short tech related questions like im getting really bad lag any way to tweak the game or my system? Generally when im able to be in game i take the person to /w or party chat and work with them. Not so much a rule but more a rule of thumb as it helps clear chat up for other questions. Fireopals our role play server and lowst pop server needed a server wide chat so /h rules allow it to be the server wide in charector tavern chat while mentor becomes the help channel for that server. Halberd the pvp server has no language rules char nameing rules etc so all channels are a free for all.
I suspect a good number of those here tend to roleplay alot as well both rp forums here are fairly well packed. Any ways ill end this post here and answer any questions you might have.
